Related papers: Gravitational microlensing of stars with transitin…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Recent studies have demonstrated that detailed monitoring of gravitational microlensing events can reveal the presence of planets orbiting the microlensed source stars. With the potential of probing planets in the Galactic Bulge and…
The current searches for microlensing events towards the galactic bulge can be used to detect planets around the lensing stars. Their effect is a short-term modulation on the smooth lightcurve produced by the main lensing star. Current and…
Gravitational microlensing occurs when a foreground star happens to pass very close to our line of sight to a more distant background star. The foreground star acts as a lens, splitting the light from the source star into two images, which…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
Under the current microlensing planet search strategy of monitoring events caused by stellar-mass lenses, only planets located within a narrow region of separations from central stars can be effectively detected. However, with the dramatic…
Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates…
Microlensing is increasingly gaining recognition as a powerful method for the detection and characterization of extra-solar planetary systems. Naively, one might expect that the probability of detecting the influence of more than one planet…
We propose a direct method to detect close-in giant planets orbiting stars in the Galactic bulge. This method uses caustic-crossing binary microlensing events discovered by survey teams monitoring the bulge to measure light from a planet…
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The microlensing method does not require the…
We show that Earth mass planets orbiting stars in the Galactic disk and bulge can be detected by monitoring microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge. The star and its planet act as a binary lens which generates a lightcurve which can differ…
More than 100 microlensing events have been detected during the last ~4 years, most of them towards the Galactic Bulge. Since the line of sight towards the Bulge passes through the disk and the Bulge itself, the known stars towards the…
Simulations of planetary microlensing at high magnification that were carried out on a cluster computer are presented. It was found that the perturbations due to two-thirds of all planets occur in the time interval [-0.5t_FWHM, 0.5t_ FWHM]…
We present a quantitative analysis of the effect of microlensing caused by random motion of individual stars in the galaxy which is lensing a background quasar. We calculate a large number of magnification patterns for positions of the…
Are microlensing searches likely to discover planets that harbor life? Given our present state of knowledge, this is a difficult question to answer. We therefore begin by asking a more narrowly focused question: are conditions on planets…
The microlensing technique has found 10 exoplanets to date and promises to discover more in the near future. While planetary transit light curves all show a familiar shape, planetary perturbations to microlensing light curves can manifest a…
The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…
We explore the detection condition of a wide-separation planet through the perturbation induced by the planetary caustic for various microlensing parameters, especially for the size of the source stars. By constructing the fractional…
The study of extra-solar planetary systems has emerged as a new discipline of observational astronomy in the past few years with the discovery of a number of extra-solar planets. The properties of most of these extra-solar planets were not…